


a home is a dream

by cerseilanniser



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternative Universe - Mafia, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Hinata Hyuuga, Dark Uzumaki Naruto, F/M, Minor Character Death, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 03:49:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18024113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerseilanniser/pseuds/cerseilanniser
Summary: Naruto Uzumaki returns home with all the force maelstrom, three days after her husband’s disappearance and six years since she went and stumbled on Neji’s body floating in the creek downtown.





	a home is a dream

1. 

 

Naruto Uzumaki returns home with all the force maelstrom, three days after her husband’s disappearance and six years since she went and stumbled on Neji’s body floating in the creek downtown.

 He hugs her, feather-light and enough space to fit a ghost, murmuring his thank yous and even though his hands are high enough to never be considered inappropriate, she still feels every place his fingers grip.

 She smiles and steps back as propriety demands of married women, welcomes him into her home and wonders if they must look like a vision.

 

2. 

 

Naruto settles back into his new home well enough. He helps with all the chores that had steadily stacked up since Toneri vanished and shares a meal or two with her, walks her to church almost every Sunday. It’s nice; it’s good.

  _That_ doesn’t make Naruto’s arrival any easier. All sorts of fucked things happen in this town but it’s a small town, a suspicious one and Naruto comes rolling back in as if he owns this place as if he wasn’t meant to be dead and ten feet underground. Hinata doesn’t ever ask about the war or where he’s been this whole time. Doesn’t bother asking how he’s still alive this whole time because –

 –because she sees how his eyes slide over her when she wears lipstick too red for a woman with a missing husband. Sees the way he sucks his breath and counts to five every time he sees something that reminds him of sticky kisses and torn scarves and Neji.

 You don’t find much kindness here. Nothing good takes root in these parts but Hinata knows a kindness when she sees it.

 So when Naruto’s hand rest a moment longer than what is necessary for a childhood friend or his gaze snags on the curve of her breast, she doesn’t say: ‘ _we never even got a third date,’_  or ‘ _can you imagine, can you just imagine.’_  She only smiles; lets the moment wash over her; feels all the places where her heart is still tender and just waiting to break and lets her tongue stutter over something more comfortable.

 She’s always been good with repaying her debts after all.

 

3. 

 

It’s not about this town, their  _childhood_  home sprawled out before them, drowning in smuggled gin and blood, isn’t about all the way shadows move and shift around him and when he walks into any room, how people stare. Isn’t about how he still smiles with sunshine clenched between his teeth, sharp enough to cut. Isn’t about how he’s sitting there across from her with blood under his nail or how she’s got a gun hidden away in her purse. Isn’t about how he brings her stolen jewels because:

_“You look so pretty with those pearls.”_

Isn’t about the way Naruto’s mouth between her legs is now a shadow, a sad phantom and how it should have never been that. Isn’t about what could have been. Isn’t about the way he still sometimes looks at her before he suddenly remembers Neji and all the promises he kept but she wishes he hadn’t.

It isn’t about a hundred thousand things.

Here is the catch though, this is their life and in their life all this and more  _matters_. Matters with all the sharp corners and edges that come with it, sharp enough to tear someone to pieces, slippery enough to fall and die. And Hinata who can still feel and trace each crack and Naruto who’s scarred and messed up – ( _Naruto who never truly returned from the war and has brought a new one to her doorstep_ ) – are more than aware of that fact.

Here’s the other catch:

“I never wanted this,” he mummers into her ear, into her neck and the slope of her shoulder far away from anyone who might hear, who might see. “Just wanted this and a nice house with a picket fence and a red door.”

 And Hinata who sometimes dreams about what life might have been like with that third date, without the war, without a dying-dead cousin, with Naruto, feels something shift, warm and hopeful, a  _dream_. They could have been heroes if it had all turned right, could have been upstanding people with two kids and a picket fence and dog. Could have been something more than a promise, one desperate frenzied fuck and the taste of melted ice cream on their tongue.

 This is the Hinata of the present. The one who carries her name with all the steel she can muster drags it along with all the history and blood and ghosts that come with being Hyuga. This Hinata doesn’t get the picket fence or the American dream. She gets Naruto’s hand crusty and dried with blood in hers and his nose buried into her neck, his lips just a kiss away.

 He rises, falters, a tired sigh ripping through him. And it’s nights like this where the room is sweltering hot and sticky from cigarette smoke and blood. Sky shifting into a dark bruise where they both stumble over words and into silence. ( _Just like old times, right_ ) Naruto’s eyes find hers, blue against lavender, both a mirror reflection of desperation.  _What now? What do we do?_ It’s nights like this that she most keenly remembers that they might have been children.

 But Hinata is twenty-two and all the wiser for age. She hasn’t hollowed her bones and stored them full of memories and Naruto’s promises, hasn't clung onto his way for nothing and she says.

 “There’s no one else but you Naruto.” She runs her fingers through his hair, nails barely scraping his scalp, holds onto the memories of last time and stores it away. Holds him, allows him to hold her and wonders if Naruto has ever allowed anyone else to see him like this. All torn and open and scared and young. Wonders if all the people he might have shown that too are all dead.

 By morning his face is a plastered smile, relaxed and bursting with sunshine. All traces of vulnerability is gone. She nods stiffly,  _good._ They’ll eat you alive here if you even show a moment of weakness. And even the shadows are wanting to cut into a bit of Naruto, the boy who used to be nothing and is now a soldier, a hero gone bad, the man who has this whole town under his little pinkie, a someone.  _This is what you need to be_

 

4. 

 

They don’t go into town often. The last time they had gone, Naruto had twisted a man’s arm so hard that it had very nearly cracked for calling her a whore. Grieving women, mourning wives shouldn’t look so pretty. Shouldn’t wear skirts that are so short that you can see up to  _here_.

 But Naruto had been in a good mood as of late and had decided to take her dancing. He had been vague about the reasons behind his good mood but she had been able to discover that it was because of a raid that had gone well, exceptionally well at that.

 “It’s a date,” Naruto says, with a smile brighter than the sun and enough exuberance to power the whole town. She stutters out her response, struggling to see where the old Naruto and the current one ends and begins.

 “I’m married,” she reminds him, stumbling, stuttering, faltering over her words and it’s like she’s sixteen again and she could hate him for the way he makes her melt and fall apart. She could _just hate him_.

 Shadows fall over his face and for a moment he looks exactly like the man they mummer and fearfully watches, the  _demon_. The moment is gone and his face settles on an alien seriousness. “You were married eh?” His face is still serious, voice timid. She nods once, twice because even though she likes to forget, this is her truth. “Townspeople say he wasn’t all too kind.” Naruto’s voice is still and hard, a calm before a storm.

 Her pulse beats alongside something and there’s something unpleasant rising, hot and fast in her mind. She pushes it down with a frightened, desperate force.  _No._

 “He’s gone now.” Is what she responds, the vision of Toneri screaming, two bloody holes for eyes caught between her teeth, trapped between her forefinger and thumb.

 He doesn’t ever question why she sounds so certain or the way her voice drags on the last word as if it’s heavy with guilt and just about ready to fracture and split. He knows better.

Naruto  _does_ take her dancing in the end. The sway and spin to some old love song. And everyone in the pub stares because _yes,_ she’s a married woman with a husband that she doesn’t care to mourn and _yes_ , he’s sharp and fast enough to slit someone’s throat but my  _oh_  my, aren’t they just a vision.

 

5. 

 

They’re spinning and spinning and her hand is resting where it shouldn’t – at his nape, fingers twisted in his hair—and his hand is right by where it should be – just on the small of her back. Except—

 –except, her ears are echoing with his quiet ‘ _I love you’_ words dredged with enough soft fatigue to set her heart alight and tongue curling with her response.

 –except, when they first came in, the two old ladies who used to smile at her whenever she brought flowers to church, pull her aside to ask if she was looking for a new husband it had taken everything and some more to not say ‘ _we might have been. He might have been my first and only.’_

 

“This is a love song,” he says, smiling and leaning down as if this is a secret, and very well might be. She laughs, loud and bright because to all of the people who didn’t yet know better, those two were a fairy tale waiting to happen. They were good children, beautiful children.

For all of those people, they would only need to be taught better.

 

6. 

 

Here’s the thing, they rarely if ever ask questions. Don’t really need too. Hinata never asks about the war, about his nightmares and his job, about why he comes back late one night and the Ōtsutsuki house on the hill is burning. And Naruto in return doesn’t ask about the gun in her purse and the knife under her pillow, about the time before him or about the scarf and Neji. It’s clear in all the lines of their body. If anyone ever had the eyes to see, they would all be able to see every single imprint and scar from each moment and memory.

  _Here’s_  the catch though, sometimes Naruto wakes up, voice hoarse and gasping because he’s all too certain that he’s still in that trench, huddling close to all the men (boys really) because this is the closest, he’ll ever get to warmth, the closest he’s ever been to having brothers.

 Sometimes, Hinata goes into his room, breathes out promises and comforts and kindnesses until he settles and stretches.

 “I thought I was still there, in the snow. I thought I was dead like all the others.” Naruto shifts so she can lay beside him and she presses herself close to him. Let’s him feel her, warm and here and just as alive as he is.

 “You’re here. We’re here, together.” And Naruto looks at her with eyes so blue and so big that they could swallow her whole. Looks at her with all the fractured guilt of someone who was left behind.

“I am here,” he says, with growing confidence but the weariness and guilt hang and drip off each line in his face. And perhaps she shouldn’t be so surprised when he pulls her closer, slants his mouth against hers and  _kisses_.

 She opens herself up to him though because she always does, has been doing so since before she could remember.

 And when he moves and shifts, painting desperate gasps and pleas on her neck, her breasts, her stomach and legs. She’s expecting tears and teeth and ghosts hanging onto their every moment. But when he shifts and moves inside her, he moves as he did in the past, loves her as if he’s been doing it this whole time.

 

7. 

 

She wakes up first and cooks them breakfast. He stumbles out of bed, head of messy untamed sunshine. It makes something in the hollowed bit of her chest warm up and she finds herself smiling. Naruto smiles back because not even the damned war and this place could take that away from him.

 “Let me take you on a date.” Naruto’s voice rises up unbidden and she stumbles and slips, slips back into sixteen-year-old Hinata, slips back into nine-year-old Hinata, slips backs into all her pasts selves that loved him with innocence and hope. Snorts cause they’ve gone and done this in the wrong order. 

 “Didn’t we already do that?” Naruto laughs, bright and happy. It makes all her insides tingle.

“You rejected me remember?” He shoots back, grins quick and laughter curling around each syllable.

 She flushes bright red and Naruto’s eyes trace her flush, curious and hungry. And this feels new –

– except, it really isn’t and now she’s got images of what he might have looked like in that red scarf she knit him and there’s no one but themselves to stand in the way of that.

“I promised you a third date, didn’t I?” And her breath catches and freezes in her lungs before coming out in a big whoosh. Feels the truth, a future pressing hard against the back of her eyes and now it isn’t just the ghosts of everyone and everything rattling away in her chest; it’s Naruto, it’s a  _future_.

 Naruto’s smile widens, transforms his face and  _him_ , this moment, it’s brighter than sunshine. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t have to.

 He can read between the lines after all.


End file.
